Time on the Lewis & Clark trail. An excellent interactive way to kick off the bicentennial of the Greatest American Road Trip. (The bicentennial isn't even until next year, but kudos to Time for being less reactive in their reporting -- let every other news source worry about WorldCom. The Timecover essay by Walter Kirn lends a nice, readable historical perspective to the journey, its purpose, and the Enlightenment-era thinking that launched the trip. James P. Ronda, author of Lewis and Clark Among the Indians, discusses Thomas Jefferson's modernist philosophy as the driving force for the journey: "Jefferson is a good man of the Enlightenment. Knowledge is valued to the extent that it is useful. The yardstick here is always utility. He'll measure a river by its navigability. He measures land by its fertility."
Reading the print edition over lunch today, another of Ronda's quotes about Lewis and Clark made me think about how we tend to view historical events through contemporary lenses. "A hundred years ago," Ronda says, "Lewis and Clark were viewed as symbols of industrial expansion, overseas imperial trade and so on. Fifty years ago, they were really viewed as cold warriors in the forest; they epitomized the virtues of the company man. Today they are multicultural diplomats and proto-ecologists."